Labor groups resist pay, benefit cut

CEBU, Philippines —  The country's biggest group of unions, the Associated Labor Unions-Trade Union Congress of the Philippines (ALU-TUCP), has strongly condemned Department of Labor and Employment’s Labor Advisory for allegedly conditioning continued employment of workers on reduced wages and benefits.

In a statement, ALU-TUCP said that Labor Advisory No. 17 is deliberate and calculated to expose employees to wider abuses in exchange for retaining employment by not just allowing lessened working hours through job-sharing and other flexible work schemes but also by giving license to employers and businesses to reduce at will the existing regional minimum wage rates and existing benefits including the negotiated wage rates and benefits agreed on through a Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) between employees and management.

   It said that the impact of the policy further harms the working people's struggle for basic survival and hit workers already agonizing with the very real fear of risk of exposure to the COVID-19 disease.

   "Workers are now reacting with deep-seated resentment and anger given the poorly implemented government response to pandemic lockdown crisis which left so many vulnerable and empty-handed," the statement reads.

ALU-TUCP added that this is highly regressive policy-making by a DOLE clearly acting out of line, and against both the spirit and letter of the Labor Code.

It said that DOLE is cynically using the pandemic crisis to camouflage the castration of legal rights won in picket lines, in the streets and by worker martyrs.

Further adding to the injury, on May 5, 2020, DOLE Secretary Silvestre Bello issued Department Order 213 prescribing revised "guidelines in the presentation of actions and the suspension of reglementary period to file pleadings, motions and other documents".

It said that this gave DOLE the opening to suspend all proceedings of labor litigations including penalties, awards and payments resulting from rendered decisions, further, it allowed the DOLE to set aside routine inspection of workplaces and complaint investigation for  occupational safety and health violations.

 Also, DOLE suspended conciliation and mediation proceedings on complaints raised by workers using the quarantine as its convenient excuse.

In short, the DOLE placed all these legal rights under a state of suspended animation as if workers’ rights are the first things to dispense with in a crisis.

“With this order, the DOLE and Secretary Bello have betrayed our workers. The DOLE treacherously struck workers now that they are the most vulnerable at the time of a continuing COVID-19 pandemic and they and their families need their livelihoods to survive,” the statement read.

“Workers will not take this sitting down and will not play fall guy to a DOLE that has shown its true colors as an enemy of the Filipino worker and his family,” it added.

The statement further said that at a time when workers needed a more pro-active champion of workers' rights and when workers' guarantees are most prone to attack, the DOLE chose to stab workers in the back.

It said that ensure that workers are sacrificed on the altar of the phased return to work with the gradual lifting of the lockdown, the DOLE also issued Labor Advisory No. 17 providing "guidelines on employment preservation upon the resumption of business operation", blatantly giving employers undue advantage and lattitude to further cut employees' wages and reduce their benefits.

“While, Section 5 of Labor Advisory 17, says that employers and employees may agree voluntarily and in writing to temporarily adjust employees' wage and wage-related benefits as provided for in existing employment contract, company policy or collective bargaining agreement (CBA), the practical effect post-lockdown, as DOLE knows very well, is to effectively impose these conditions on workers whose bargaining powers zero have been erased by the pandemic and the lockdown. DOLE wants to reduce workers to modern day slavery.

“DOLE has forgotten, that the Labor Code itself states that all doubts in the implementation of this Code, including its implementing rules and regulations, shall be rendered in favor of labor.”

The ALU TUCP now calls the DOLE to account. ALU TUCP demands that genuine worker-employee determination on how to ensure job retention be fairly done.  JMD (FREEMAN)